...the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

That's how Middlemarchends, marvelously. I was alerted to it by her greatest fan, Rebecca Mead, who also shines a light on Eliot's philosophical smarts. For instance:

“Love does not say 'I ought to love'—it loves. Pity does not say, 'It is right to be pitiful'—it pities. Justice does not say,'I am bound to be just'—it feels justly.” She goes on to say that dependency upon a rule or theory only when moral emotion is weak. "We think experience, both in literature and in life, has shown that the minds whichare pre-eminently didactic—which insist on a lesson and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion,” she writes. My Life in Middlemarch

Score that for Hume, against Kant, and against all hyper-intellectualism in philosophical ethics.

The other salute came from Robert Coles in his intro to volume 7 of William James's Correspondence, noting Eliot's (and Tolstoy's) superior psychological acuity to that of most professional psychologists. Probably true still, certainly so in their time.

Up@dawn 2.0

The Philosophy of Happiness

Montaigne's garden

"I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about IT or - still less- my unfinished garden" Montaigne

(I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.)

I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself... we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

Fossils in the making

“If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.” Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Getting stuff done

“At the core of every habit is a neurological loop with three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward. To understand how to create habits — such as exercise habits — you must learn to establish the right cues and rewards.” nyt

Atheism & Philosophy

Environmental Ethics

Bioethics

Links to this & that

Greetings from Earth

Winterton C. Curtis

My first landlord was an old zoologist at the University of Missouri named Winterton Curtis (1875-1965). He was one of the scientific experts not allowed to testify at the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN in 1925. My parents (and I) rented rooms from him in his home on Westmount in Columbia Missouri while Dad attended Veterinary school at Mizzou in the early '60s, and later maintained a cordial friendship with him. He used to visit when I was a kid and pull dollar bills from my ears. Dad thought that must be why I was always so fascinated by the concept of evolution.

The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology

Of the Scopes Trial itself, he wrote of the 1925 Dayton Tennessee spectacle:

The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial

Je suis Charlie

"And maybe this is what I have learned more than anything from my great-great-grandfather: to keep my eyes and my mind open, to enjoy the wonders of nature and never cease to ask questions." Sarah Darwin, foreword to "A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything" by Hanne Strager

"I'd like to have an argument..."

I don't do Facebook...

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My Favorite Philosophers

Couldn't pick just five.

1. William James2. John Stuart Mill3. John Dewey4. David Hume5. Michel de Montaigne6. Bertrand Russell7. Ralph Waldo Emerson/Henry David Thoreau (a tie, and a couple)8. Aristotle (mostly because he contradicts Plato)

Where are the women? Up until relatively recently, they weren't invited into the conversation. But I'm doing my homework. Thanks to Jennifer Michael Hecht's wonderful Doubt: A History, I know the names of some 19th century women who'd likely have become favorites of mine and many others, in a better world: Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Annie Besant, Ernestine Rose, Etta Semple, Helen Hamilton Gardener...

Ray Lankford's bat

in the hands of a great ex-catcher

"KO"

Great nickname for the pitcher who shut out Hillwood in the postseason opener!

It's her time

The clock on my office wall

Hobbes

He walked much and contemplated, and he had in the head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it."

"It cannot be always seaside...

...even as it cannot be always May, and through the gaps thought creeps in." H.G. Wells

Song of the Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose...

I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also...

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth...

Allons! the road is before us!

It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d! ...